Shower Leakage in a Highly Granular Calorimeter

This note presents the analysis of experimental data collected using the CALICE prototypes, during the 2007 test beam campaign at CERN. The complete setup of the experiment consisted of a silicon-tungsten electromagnetic calorimeter, an analog scintillator-steel hadron calorimeter and a scintillator-steel tail catcher. Events collected using pion beams in the energy range 8-100 GeV are selected and compared to the Monte Carlo simulations. While the leakage from the full setup is negligible, when removing the tail catcher information either partly or completely the energy loss becomes significant and affects the performance. The average measured energy decreases below the expected beam energy and the resolution deteriorates. A correction to the leakage was implemented for pions having the first hard interaction in the hadron calorimeter. The results obtained show that the correction is powerful in restoring the mean value of the measured energy distributions back to the expected beam energy, with an accuracy at the 1-2% level over the whole energy range. The relative improvement on the resolution is about 25% at 80 GeV, decreasing at lower energies together with the impact of the leakage.